At last, murder and suicide were better than the
jail, and she fired twice again, and this time did not miss.
"Insane" was the verdict. But it is perhaps reasonable to ascribe the
insanity to the conditions which found their black fruition in the
woman's act, rather than to the despairing creature herself. She had all
that most women would ask for happiness--a good husband, a darling
little son, an assured support. But there was ever before her eyes the
ghastly, inhuman spectacle and burden of the jail; she knew it through
and through, and she could endure it no longer. She pictured her
innocent boy growing up and following his father's trade. The idea
tortured her beyond the limits of her strength, and she accepted the
only alternative--death. She was not a prisoner--she was only a looker
on; but that is what prison did for her. And our press, echoing our own
will, and our courts, voicing our own laws, keeps on shouting, "Put the
crooks in stripes; show them no mercy!"
Shall we not pause a moment over the bodies of this mother and her son,
over this frenzied murder and suicide? They constitute an arraignment of
the prison principle not to be lightly passed over, or commented on with
rasping irony by witty editorial writers. That tragedy means something.
We cannot lease the community's real estate to hell, for building hell
houses and carrying on hell business, supported by our taxes and
advocated by our courts and praised (or "reformed") by our
penologists--we cannot do that without meeting the consequences.
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